It’s a Light Green Lifestyle

Jen Boulden, founder of the green lifestyle website JenB TV. She began the site with those who “were driving their SUVs to Whole Foods” in mind.CreditCreditMaximo Morrone

By Christopher F. Schuetze

Nov. 18, 2014

Jen Boulden was a serial start-up entrepreneur before she decided to go back to school for a master’s degree in environmental policy and management at George Washington University, in 2004. That same year, she co-founded a daily green-lifestyle email subscription service, Ideal Bite, sold four years later to Disney with 318,000 daily subscribers, for $20 million. Ms. Boulden remained with the venture, overseeing its growth to more than 500,000 daily subscribers until Disney shut it down in 2010. She then started JenB TV, a green lifestyle website on which she posts advice weekly.

Q. You were involved in four start-ups before you started Ideal Bite. What made you want to start a green business?

A. In starting a green business I would have an opportunity to, hopefully, show the world that you could do well by doing good. I really just wanted to be the example — or another example — of, “Hey, you actually don’t have to sell out in order to make money.”

Q. Can you talk about becoming a voice on a sometimes controversial topic?

A. I think that our voice was definitely one of the keys to success. It took a while to develop. So we really worked very hard on the voice in making it true to our brand. Our tag line was “a sassier shade of green.” So we knew our voice had to be somewhat irreverent. We talked about not “ways to save water,” but “shower with a friend!”

Q. You’ve called your subscribers “light green consumers.” How do they differ from other environmentalists?

A. Our light green subscribers are the ones that were driving their SUVs to Whole Foods. It really represents such a large swath of the population. The people that want to do the right thing and, when given the opportunity, will make the right choice, but they are not going to build a tree house and live in it for their full-time home. How we attracted a large amount of people, right off the bat, is by saying: “Hey, we are not perfect, and you don’t have to be perfect.” That’s why we call it light green.

Q. You went from running Ideal Bite with a partner to running a business with 27 full-time employees. How did success change the company?

A. We were very, very careful about not letting it change our writing or our style. We actually put it in our contracts with Disney that we would maintain the ultimate editorial control. That was paramount for us. On the one hand, it did become easier because we had five people now doing the job that I used to do. So, I had more time to focus on the things that only I could do. But from a more challenging standpoint was how do you keep that fire and that vigor running through the lifeline of the company? All of a sudden we were sitting in the headquarters of Disney in Burbank and we have larger budgets and we have more people and you bump into fancy executives in the hallways. And it just doesn’t have that gritty start-up feeling. And I think people like that culture, actually. We are all doing the work of five people and we are having a blast.

Q. Ideal Bite was eventually shut down by Disney. How do you explain that?

A. Disney bought the company because they wanted to make sure that they were in on the green movement. It was a genuine intention to bring Ideal Bite in and kind of pump it though all of their various global distribution channels. Really, we set out to bring green mainstream. But, fast forward from the year 2008, when we were acquired, to the year 2010, when we were basically shut down: The economy had changed drastically. I think that, we being a very small business unit of Disney, it just didn’t make sense putting priority on green when the rest of the world had shifted to thinking about the economy.

Q. Had it outlived its usefulness?

A. No, we were growing at a really fast rate. People were still gobbling up the content in 2010. And the way that media works and the concept of viral media is that it spreads by word of mouth, so the more people you have in your base, the more people to be able to tell people. It just grows at an exponential rate. So we had really hit a really fast growth curve, people were still really into it. Still to this day, four years later, I will get an email about every other month from someone saying “where did Ideal Bite go? I still miss it.”

Q. You focus on the positive in a subject often associated with doom and gloom.

A. I know that I don’t want to hear doom and gloom — I even shut down. So why not talk about, for example, how it benefits you? How it helps you save money? How it benefits your health? How one can make a large impact for the health of our planet? As opposed to talking about the polar bears dying and the ice caps melting. We know it’s out there, we don’t need to be reminded.

Q. For JenB TV, you and your team make free-streaming lifestyle videos. Does the change in medium affect the message?

A. The main difference with video, especially in this day and age of so much user-generated content, is that it’s a little bit more personal. You are inviting people into your life. Therefore they expect a little more personal information. It runs in tandem to reality television.

Q. Given the proliferation of free videos, coupled with the fact that the sustainability topic is ever more popular, how do you capture your market?

A. It’s always an art and a science. As it relates to green, you’ve got to make it not your grandmother’s green. No one wants to hear how they have to bike to work every day. And there’s the mechanics. That’s the science. You need to optimize your content. For video that means looking at the other videos out there, making sure you are going to be doing a topic that will be very popular and then making sure you are using the right keywords and search phrases.